Does relationship counselling make a difference

Relationship counselling represents for many the last port of call to fix a relationship. The place that you go when all else has failed. Yet often those who have been to relationship counselling talk of it being a positive experience. Even those couples who find it hard to communicate without it becoming a shouting match often find that there is something different about the quality of relationship counselling. The environment allows a calmer form of communication. The counsellor helps them to both hear and be heard. While there are no guarantees in relationship counselling it seems that the success rate is higher than talking it alone.

Consider he patient who cuts his hand and treats it themselves. They try home treatments; salves and ointments but the cut gets infected and the damage spreads, so they try dressings and poultices yet to no effect finally they think I will try a doctor and they end up in the emergency room. Perhaps then we need to re-examine the thought that relationship counselling should be he tool of last resort. Perhaps if used earlier, it would make a difference more quickly and more effectively. Perhaps it may even bring you closer together.

In reading articles on relationship counselling, the subject of good communication will have come up. Counselling often concentrates on this and it is because couples often get into shorthand. They ‘know’ what their partner thinks or feels. They perhaps fall into patterns of behaviour that frustrate each other, but they can’t talk about the frustration, because they are afraid of conflict. Relationship counselling tackles this head on and helps you to be engaged in listening to each other and really hearing with empathy again. It is important that you are able to tackle conflict as a couple for it is unrealistic to think that there will never be a disagreement about your relationship. You need a respectful way to tackle those feelings, without feeling threatened.

Perhaps you can see that the longer you have persisted with unhelpful patterns in your relationship, the harder your task will be in changing your relationship in relationship counselling to a more open happy one. There is always hope and many difficult relationships make the transition every day. The real secret is taking action quickly when you notice here is a problem.

Finally this article is not arguing that every relationship problem needs a counsellor to resolve it. Rather it is suggesting that if you find that problems in your relationship are persisting over a long period of time (around 6 weeks) then perhaps considering relationship counselling is a positive step towards a lasting solution. Perhaps you need the scope that a counsellor offers to make some of the shifts in thinking that brings you back to the reasons that you both came together in the first place.

Relationship counselling is a straight forward process that offers you a practical way to address problems that you face in your relationship. A mix of looking at real world problems and the underlying processes that has been lying dormant and is at work. So consider relationship counselling if you find your relationship is in difficulty.